APPLIED LINGUISTICS WORKSHOP 1

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Investigating Language Development: Between Innate Structures and Learned

Sound Maps

The journey that every human child undertakes to acquire language is nothing
short of miraculous. From the coos and babbling of infants to the complex sentences
of a five-year-old, the development of language in children has intrigued researchers
for centuries. One such way to investigate this journey has been through diary studies,
such as the pioneering work by Charles Darwin on his own child, and later, the
exhaustive diaries of Clara and Wilhelm Stern and Werner Leopold. These diaries allow
us to observe the linguistic development milestones that seemingly follow a universal
pattern across different children.

But the question that poses a fascinating riddle is: What quality do children
possess that enables them to learn a language while other creatures, like kittens, do
not? Two primary ideas to solve this are:

1. Children might have a specialized, domain-specific knowledge about

language, possibly an innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD) as suggested by
Chomsky's theory.

2. Children's domain-general cognitive abilities enable them to learn language

through an inherent mental grammar.

Acknowledging the Chomskyan Revolution with the concept of Syntactic

Structures, it is argued that it's not necessarily what we say, but the mental grammar
behind what we say that's crucial.

The debate of nature versus nurture is a running theme in this field. Nativists
argue that children have a pre-existing neural structure for language development,
implying that language learning is an innate function. On the other hand, empiricism
maintains that experience is the source of all knowledge.

Integrating both ideas, the Interactionist/Constructivist view suggests that while

children’s learning of language might indeed be bolstered by some innate knowledge, it
is also a product of the child's interactions with their environment.
 We move into newer territory as we consider the nature of the inborn aspects of
language acquisition: Is it knowledge or the procedures for learning that are innate? We
observe that all human languages bear common structural features, which could
suggest an innate bias towards language structure.

Statistical learning is one of the cornerstone concepts reinforcing the idea that
some learning procedures are innate. Infants can track the frequency of syllables and
tones, hinting at a pre-existing capacity to discern patterns and regularities in sensory
input.

Complex cognitive processes are under scrutiny as well: Are domain-specific

abilities, selectively tuned to language, responsible for acquisition, or do general
cognitive processes, which apply to all forms of learning, govern linguistic
development?

These debates lend themselves to various methodologies that aim to decode

the nature of language acquisition, including computational modeling which seeks to
replicate a child's learning process within a digital environment.

Such understanding is not just academic. It has practical implications, reflected

in the ways we assess and nurture language development in children through tools like
the Mean Length of Utterance and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test.

Continuing research in this realm is not only crucial for cognitive science but
also for understanding human intelligence, consciousness, and our very nature.

Questionnaire:

1. What are diary studies, and who is known to have conducted the first one?

2. What was Charles Darwin's contribution to understanding child language development?

3. Why might language acquisition in children be compared to physical growth?

4. What is the Language Acquisition Device (LAD)?

5. How did Noam Chomsky revolutionize the study of language development?

6. Describe the 'Poverty of the Stimulus' argument.

7. What are the primary components of the nativist perspective on language acquisition?

8. Compare and contrast the nativist and empiricist views.

9. What does the Interactionist/Constructivist view say about language learning?

10. How might the concept of Universal Grammar contribute to language development?

11. What are domain-specific processes in the context of language acquisition?

12. Describe how statistical learning plays a role in language development.

13. What is the difference between innate knowledge and innate learning procedures?

14. How can computational modeling be used in language acquisition research?

15. What does the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) measure?

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